Silverblind (Ironskin)

by Tina Connolly

  “Do you see regular things, too?” said Tam.

  Annika closed her normal eye. “Regular things look a little less … solid,” she said. “The mountain is fairly solid, but the trees are a tiny bit blurry. Animals blurrier still.” She looked around. “Do you see any birds?”

  Dorie silently pointed to the nearest, a jay half-hidden in a larch above them.

  Annika was silent for a moment. Then she said, “So that’s what that red blur is.” She looked down at the two of them. “You’re a red blur, too, Tam.” She opened both eyes, closed the silver one, then went back to closing the blue one. “Can I opto-paralyze you?” Annika mused, turning the force of her silver eye on Tam.

  Tam felt himself all over, a probing expression on his face. “I don’t think so,” he said, then suddenly laughed. “No, I’d have to be fey, wouldn’t I?” Now that the immediate danger for Annika had passed, he was giddy with another of his myths being proven. “We’ll have to find the fey and try.”

  “That seems dangerous,” put in Dorie. She wasn’t sure she wanted Annika to have the chance to find out what the basilisk in her eye could do.

  “No, we must,” said Annika. “Pack up and come on.”

  Annika pushed her way through the forest and Dorie and Tam had to follow. Tam looked excited; Dorie felt ill. They reached the spot where they had seen the fey—the blue mist was still hanging around, minding its own business as far as Dorie could tell.

  “Annika,” she said again, but Annika advanced on it, silver palm out just in case her eye should fail. The blue drifted, then stiffened. A mirror of Annika’s face formed, painfully slowly—the fey was attempting to talk to them, Dorie could tell, and it didn’t even have enough knowledge of human conventions, or images stored away, to form some other face. Sick horror twisted inside.

  “Hellllp me,” it said slowly, the fey communication transmuting into a language the humans could understand. Woglet gripped Dorie’s shoulder, his pinprick claws digging in.

  “Please, Annika,” Dorie managed again.

  An unexpected source backed her up. “It doesn’t mean any harm,” Tam said. “I’ve been around enough of them to tell.”

  “They all can cause harm,” Annika said coolly. “Anyway, it’s science.”

  “I caaan goooo,” the fey said again. “Let me goooo.”

  “Show me where there are more of you,” said Annika.

  “Really, don’t you think we should—” said Dorie.

  But Annika didn’t even bother to tell her to shut up. “Take notes for me, Thomas,” she said crisply. “Opto-paralyzing for more than five seconds appears to nearly immobilize the fey. The eye with the basilisk is fully open. Next I intend to see if I can release the paralyzation field just enough to have it obey a command. I will attempt to find out if this is a physical constraint—lowering the eyelid partway—or a mental one.”

  The fey tried one more time. “Help uuusss,” it said, and the face turned toward Dorie, who felt her heart bottom out. She did not know what to do or say without exposing herself, so she did nothing. Slowly the fey turned away and started to drift through the trees.

  They followed the blue mist. Annika’s eyes were at half-mast, the silver one a half-moon reflecting light. The fey moved slowly, painfully, and then it rounded a clearing and they saw hundreds of fey.

  And a large silver machine.

  “Duck,” said Tam immediately, and he pulled Annika under cover. It broke the connection between her and the fey, and she shot him a sour silver look as they crouched in the leaves. An act that could be parsed two ways, thought Dorie, but she could not try to analyze it further just now. All her attention was on the field: the fey, the machine, the silver-palmed men.

  Like the basilisk tail, the machine had left a track through the forest. Trees and bushes were felled behind it as the men had bushwhacked a way for it to come into the fey-heavy clearing. The machine hissed and let off smoke, but the fey, who normally would be repulsed by both things, hung around it in the clearing as if held there by a magnet. One of the silvermen had a long hose with a funnel, and he was cautiously maneuvering it close to the fey.

  “What do they think—” started Dorie.

  Tam said angrily, “Down, I said,” and pulled a shaking Dorie back down behind the bush. She grabbed an unprotesting Woglet and cradled him close, keeping them hidden.

  The man with the funnel had to get very close to the hovering fey to get them into the suction tube. It was a lengthy process even with the fey staying close to the clearing; maneuvering around the other hanging fey, carefully getting the hose to one particular fey. Eventually he got one, and with great whirs the blue was pulled into the machine. Horror filled Dorie’s chest. She wanted to run down there, do something, but Tam’s grip was tight. Another man stood at the back of the machine, where he carefully took small blue packages and tucked them away into a well-lined case. Dorie could hear the shriek of the fey death—no, not death, though perhaps it would be kinder—as the fey was split into bits, each bound with some sort of silvery substance to keep it contained.

  Then one of the blue bits escaped from the back of the machine, wriggled free into the air.

  The machine croaked to a halt and one of the silvermen shouted, “We need another egg!”

  From a portable incubator just like Tam’s, the other man brought an egg out. He was wearing heavy gloves. “We’ve only got a few of these left,” he said. “Damn Stilby wants an outrageous sum for the haul he got. They were still negotiating when I left this morning.” He carried the egg over to the small copper funnel on the machine—and then cracked it on the side, dropping shell, goo, wyvern chick and all, straight into the hopper. Dorie shut her eyes, but she was too late to unsee it. Woglet struggled, and Dorie clamped him firmly under her armpit. She opened her eyes and stared the little wyvern down, willing him not to yodel his distress. Her mind could not stop replaying the scene and envisioning her Woglet being cracked into the hopper.

  “Dammit,” said a man down below. “We’ll need twice as many eggs just for those we’ve captured today.” He gestured at the fey hanging around the clearing. The first man restarted the machine and they began pulling the fey again.

  “The wyvern albumen,” said Dorie, her hands shaking. “It isn’t just for protection. That’s what they’re using to permanently split the fey.”

  “Clean energy forever,” said Annika, and her voice rang with something so awed that Dorie knew then, if she hadn’t before, that they were on opposite sides of this issue. She looked down at the vials in her palm. “I expect the basilisk albumen might stretch farther, ja? Be many times as powerful?”

  “You can’t,” said Tam.

  Annika stood, looked down at the two of them. The silver eye reflected the one in her palm. She was a symbol of everything the Crown hoped to find—the beautiful girl channeling the legendary basilisk. A figurehead in truth. “There are moments,” she said, “when you are given the chance to prove whose side you are on. You cannot play both sides. You cannot hide,” and she threw a cold look at Dorie. She held out her hand to Tam. “You have the chance to come with me and be part of this. We will let them know we found it together. It is the missing piece they need—the basilisk albumen, more powerful than the wyvern albumen. Show them what you would do for your country.”

  Tam looked at Annika for a long time. At last he said, “I think we have different ideas of what we should do for our country. I cannot lie, even for you. If you go down there, you are a different person than I thought you were.”

  “Same to you,” she said softly. And then she marched out of the trees, down to the men, who stood, both repelled and fascinated by the pretty girl with the silver eye. They had no fey in them and yet they might as well have been paralyzed as she strode up to them and pledged her help.

  Dorie looked down at Tam, who was still watching Annika, betrayal written on his face. “Come on,” she said gently. “We’d better get out of here.”

 
; They trudged back to the burned-out circle to gather the rest of their things. Tam was silent the whole way. So was Woglet. “They’re wrong to do that,” Tam said at last.

  “I know,” said Dorie.

  They sat on a stump and looked at the vortex. “Do you think the circle lasts as long as the basilisk is here?” Tam said.

  Dorie nodded. “I think it explains where they go to. They come to a safe hatching place, and then they return.”

  “And this place was safe for thousands of years,” said Tam.

  Dorie spun scenarios. “Do you think there are no humans where they come from? Or lots of them?”

  “Perhaps there are lots of fey,” said Tam. “The way the fey and wyverns are enemies. Fey and basilisk surely are as well. They don’t seem to have a fear of man—that would lead me to think there aren’t any at home. But the question is, where is home?”

  “Do you promise to believe me if I tell you?” said Dorie.

  He looked at her and she knew what he saw. Scruffy, quirky Dorian—in looks completely unlike his porcelain cousin. Someone he had thought he could trust, when he had stopped trusting Dorie long ago. His life had been a series of betrayals—how could he trust one more time? “Perhaps,” he said.

  “When I was here on Saturday,” Dorie said, “I went into the circle. But it was different than it was today for me. I saw so many things I felt sick. And then, I let my finger go all blue and touched the circle, and—this.” She unwrapped the bandage from her right hand and showed him the bloodless, perfectly healed missing tip of her finger. It had finally stopped itching.

  “I wouldn’t think that sort of thing could happen to you,” he said.

  Did he mean, because she was half-fey? She wasn’t ready to press it. “Since then,” she said, “I seem to see other Dories.”

  The notebook was out. “Go on.”

  “I think the basilisk is from another world. And not just another world. Another timeline. One of those worlds that splinters off at the changes.”

  “That’s the same story—”

  “You collected in your book, I know. I know. I didn’t steal from that; I’m corroborating.”

  “Multiple worlds,” he said with awe. “Another fey story proves to be true.” He looked again at her finger. “But why didn’t anything bad happen today?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It only happened last time when I went fey. And this time—” She held out her palm with the silver symbol.

  “You couldn’t,” he finished.

  “But I did feel something strange.” She stepped back inside the circle again. She looked out at the ring. There were the multiple Dories, a blur of Dories. But if she concentrated … She stepped up to the edge of the circle and tentatively put her left hand to it, the one with the wyvern goo embedded in it. The basilisk was somehow able to control this portal. Focus it, to use it as a stepping-stone between the worlds. Could the wyvern goo help her do the same? Thinking of the basilisk, she focused on that. Where had the creature come from? She envisioned it—its metallic coloring, its massive wingspan. Its four toes.

  She could feel something then. Traces of the pathway. She sought out that vision and it was as though the rest of the worlds stopped turning, until she was looking at only one—the side of the mountain, just like her own. The sight was overlaid on her own mountain; they fit together in a blurry picture. But the basilisk’s mountain was crisscrossed with many tracks from basilisk tails. In the distances she saw more of the creatures, diving and swooping. No, this was definitely not her world. And then—blue. She almost jerked away, but she held still. The fey, masses and masses of them, drifting across the mountain path. More fey than she had ever seen at once here. Perhaps it was a world where the Great War had never happened.

  Or where the fey had decisively won.

  She pulled her hand away and looked at Tam. “If the basilisk could go through here, why not the fey?”

  He pointed at the missing tip of her finger. “I think you already proved they can.”

  She clenched her fist, thinking of the systematic destruction under way in the forest. The fey had once been a powerful enemy. But that was then and this was now. “It’s the only way to save them. They have to leave here—forever.”

  Chapter 14

  BELIEF

  Perhaps the betrayal at fifteen is what led Tam down the path to betrayal himself. Or perhaps it was earlier, when a fey took over his father and betrayed him in that way. When that fey taught him how to lie.

  —Thomas Lane Grimsby, Silverblind: The Story of Adora Rochart

  * * *

  Talk was all very well, but how to get all the fey in the country to the circle? More important, how to do it before the basilisk returned home and the circle closed for good? Dorie and Tam trekked upward again to feel the eggs, and she guessed that the last one would hatch Thursday afternoon. On the way down the mountain she found a small cluster of fey that had not been seized by the men with their machine, and she warned them about it, and told them to tell other fey to collect near the basilisk. But she was not really sure how much of the conversation got through to them. It was very hard to converse with fey without being able to slip into her fey side herself; they drifted back and forth and she wasn’t sure they listened at all.

  It was well after midnight when Tam dropped her off at her flat. Bone tired, she stumbled as she got out of the auto. “Hey, easy,” he said, and came around and helped her up. His glasses reflected the streetlight as he squeezed her bony boy-shoulders. “We’ll make it,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get some sleep. What time do we have to start in on the ironskin tomorrow?”

  “Six,” said Dorie.

  “Well. Get a few hours’ sleep, anyway. I won’t have the car—I have to turn it in. We’ll be walking.”

  She nodded and turned, wearily dragging her feet toward the stairs.

  “Hey,” he said. “I was thinking. You might not have to keep that wyvern tattoo on, if you don’t want it.”

  “Yeah?”

  Tam held out his palm with the tattoo on it. “You might be able to abrade the tattoo off. Lose a few layers of skin, but…” He shrugged. “How far down does the poison go, you think? Bloodstream or surface level? It could work.”

  She stared at him, smiling, and he gave a half-smile in response. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “I won’t.”

  He got back in the auto and closed the door. “Dorie?” he said as she reached the stairs, and she turned, one more time.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Take care.”

  The car was around the corner before she realized he’d called her Dorie.

  * * *

  Moira had been true to her word—not that Dorie had doubted her for an instant. When she went to retrieve the eggs the next morning, the secretary handed her a sealed envelope. Inside were the list of names and addresses for every ironskin left. Dorie thought how ironic it was that those left had led an ignored and dismissed existence for twenty years, but now that they could be fixed, this list was suddenly as dangerous as a copperhead hydra. They would have to work carefully and fast to get each person aligned with an egg in time.

  There was no time for niceties. Dorie split the eggs and the list with Tam. She roped Stella and her apartment in to care for the baby wyverns—she hated to do it, but there was no one left to ask, and Stella was not the sort to get flustered.

  She had split the list geographically with Tam—though most ironskin lived in the slums anyway—and they began crisscrossing the route, moving with caution. They were helped by the fact that at this point, nearly everyone knew they were coming. She rather thought their underground network had supplied them with more names than the government would know; still, they found three flats already ransacked and the ironskin gone.

  They had thirteen eggs left, nine of which were hatching today. Ten ironskin. One was a little old lady whose curse was on her hand, and was fear. She
lived alone and refused to wear iron, and also refused the treatment. “I’ve lived with it twenty years, and it’s my best defense against prowlers,” she said.

  “But perhaps you have children you’d like to see,” said Dorie. “Grandchildren who are too afraid to come.”

  The woman smiled and patted Dorie on the head and refused to answer. “You save your egg for some young pup who needs it,” she said.

  The egg was in fact near to hatching, and Dorie ran all the way to her next stop, the wyvern chick cracking through in her hands as she burst through the door.

  As careful as Dorie was, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. She felt lost without her fey ability to shake pursuit, to blend in. Still, she finished the last of her list without incident. Tam had finished his, and with a profound sense of relief they trudged up the stairs with their last two woglets to Stella’s flat to collect the rest.

  Unlike Colin’s flat, Stella’s had not been ransacked. It was as neat and orderly as the dwarvven girl liked it: everything in miniature, everything properly pressed.

  But the woglets were gone.

  And Stella was gone.

  Only one of Stella’s small chairs, overturned on the carpet, gave a clue that anything untoward might have happened.

  This time Tam reached for Dorie, put his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll get her back,” he said.

  Dorie wanted to relax into his arm, but she pulled away. “I have to tell Jack,” she said. “I have to tell Jack.” That triggered the memory that it was Wednesday and that meant tonight was the revised gallery opening. “Come on,” she said.

  * * *

  The gallery was packed. People were spilling out of the building onto the front steps and down and for a moment Dorie thought the show had been shut down again. But no, the doors were wide open—it was just the crush of people moving in and out. Someone posted at the door was barring the way, keeping the hordes to a reasonable level, and clearly loving it. Scents of sandalwood, of cigarette smoke, of many many people, drifted around the throng. Dorie pushed her way through up to the door. She was planning to dampen down her visibility and sneak in, and she was all the way to the front before she remembered she was stuck as plain visible Dorian, and she couldn’t smooth things along.